Stefan Ukris Amaris (born 28 August 2717 – died 29 October 2779, aged 62 years) befriended and masterfully manipulated Richard Cameron, the young and vulnerable First Lord of the Star League. Betraying Richard, Stefan assassinated him and usurped his throne. He was later defeated and executed by Aleksandr Kerensky and entered history as Stefan the Usurper.[1]

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Stefan Ukris Amaris was born on August 28, 2717, in the Rim Worlds Republic. Even as a little boy, Stefan was indoctrinated in the politics of the Rim Worlds and the significance of the deeds of his ancestors, so that one day he would be able to fulfill his destiny:

“

Mother says I must record my thoughts so that future people can learn from me and so she has given me this diary. She says it is important that future people know what I had to learn and what is our family story. She has told me that story every birthday since I was little, that Princess Terens Amaris sacrificed her life on Terra so that she could bring light to the people of the Rim Worlds and that her best friend, Lady Heather, made her the queen of the Rim Worlds. Then many years later, the evil king Cameron of Terra tried to take control of all of everything and unlike most of the free Perrifry [sic] kingdoms, Terens’s grandson King Gregory decided to allow the bully to take his stuff. Some of the people didn’t like this and told Gregory to go away but he said no and so they hit him. Gregory fought bravely but had to hide for many years while the bullies tried to discover his secrets. But they weren’t clever enough and eventually he escaped and the bullies were punished.

As Amaris grew into adulthood, his keen grasp of Star League politics became evident:

“

I’m not sure what I expected of the Martial Olympiad. Something more...military, I suppose. Instead, the Outreach games seemed more corporate sponsorship and arms fair than a competition. Sure, there was a lot of jingoistic drivel and flag-waving for the SLDF and condescending praise for the poor unfortunate House forces who failed to make these finals, but in essence its purpose has been lost. Cameron doesn’t care - he’s lost in la-la-land, and those self-aggrandizing wastrels of the High Council are too busy with their own schemes. Even the Commanding General, Becky Fetladral, seems unengaged with the contest, not seeing how far it has fallen. Her aide is another matter. He sees and he cares—someone to watch out for. God, what was his name? Ah yes. Kerensky.

Shortly after Richard Cameron became First Lord of the Star League in 2751, Stefan realized that young Richard was isolated, starving for friendship and attention, and therefore extremely vulnerable.

In 2753, Stefan began to cultivate Richard's trust by sending him gifts and through simple flattery; he even renamed the capital of the Rim Worlds Republic, Apollo as Terra Prime to "honor Richard".

Through these means and by ostensibly supporting Richard's naïve political initiatives like Executive Order 156 Stefan became his closest friend and confidant.

He persuaded Richard to remove all SLDF forces from the Rim Worlds Republic and to hand their local bases and fortresses over to the Rim Worlds Republic Military. While the Houses started skirmishing on the verge of Richard's majority Stefan continued to expand his influence over Richard. In an act of revenge for slights cooked up by Amaris, Richard ordered all House armed forces to be disbanded. The Lords protested loudly, and even Kerensky, commander of the Star League Defense Force, stated that the order was illegal.

Furious, and convinced by Amaris that Kerensky and the House Lords were against him, Richard withdrew his order, becoming increasingly embittered.

Richard's Taxation Edict of 2763 further increased the financial burden of the Periphery, and caused great civil unrest. Faced with popular refusal and defiance, he ordered General Kerensky to the Periphery, which quickly erupted in open rebellion. Unknown to all Amaris was behind everything.

As more and more of the SLDF forces were required to fight the war in the Periphery, Stefan offered the services of his Rim Worlds forces. Despite the objections of (?), Richard accepted. A secret agreement between Richard Cameron and Stefan Amaris was signed in 2764; Stefan agreeing to lend his own troops to garrison the bases of the SLDF and to defend the Terran Hegemony if needed.

Following the secession of New Vandenberg and 17 other Periphery worlds in April 2765 an ever-increasing number of SLDF units, including Cameron household units, were sent to the Periphery. By 2766 three-quarters of the Regular Army was deployed along the Periphery.

On Terra, a suspiciously large number of troops from Stefan's household guard replaced the SLDF units sent to New Vandenberg, eventually outnumbering the remaining SLDF units. All was set and ready for the impending coup d'etat.

On December 27 2766, Amaris seized his chance. He presented Richard Cameron with a ceremonial, jewel-encrusted laser pistol in the Star League High Council chamber, Unity City, Terra, and then shot him through the head. At the same time Stefan's troops moved against Terra and the other worlds of the Terran Hegemony. On the first day, 95 of its 103 planets fell to the surprise attack.

Besides ordering the execution of every man, woman and child with a drop of Cameron blood, Stefan also imprisoned Drago Kurita, the ambassador of the Draconis Combine[4]. Being a grand-nephew of Takiro Kurita, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine, the ambassador and his family became valuable hostages; a means to pressure House Kurita.

As a part of his efforts to legitimize his position, Amaris called for a free election to be held within the Terran Hegemony to elect the Hegemony's new Director-General. The President of the Terran Congress, Count Frederick Oldenhof, served as Director-General Pro Tem in the interval between the death of Richard Cameron and the elections, which were to be held on 28 January 2767. Stefan Amaris was nominated for the position of Director-General on the ballot; two additional nominees originally included their names, Atrisha Kisabaka from Bryant and Somjit Berkhout from Fomalhaut. However, both withdrew from the election prior to ballots being cast, with Berkhout forced to withdraw following an indictment for embezzlement and Kisabaka choosing to withdraw to focus on "family needs" - a result of Amaris having Kisabaka's family rounded up and thrown into a gulag in Africa.[5]

When the election results were published by the Department of Administration, the official report showed an eighty-five percent turnout - a record - with almost seventy percent voting in favour of Stefan Amaris for the post of Director-General. This was in defiance of projections, which prediced a turnout of less than ten percent, and was a direct result of vote-rigging by forces and agents loyal to Amaris; examples of voter fraud included Amaris' agents turning in massive, favourable vote counts from worlds like New Dallas and Sabik, which had been cut off from the HPG network. The results were posted by Hegemony governors on the 30th of January, unanimously declaring Amaris Director-General; less than eighty governors were actually alive or able to return their votes, and many did so under duress, but the result stood.[5]

In January 2767, Amaris proclaimed himself emperor. News of the coup did not reach general Aleksandr Kerensky until May of 2767 when Amaris re-established communications and tried to gain the general's support.

“

General:

I, with my infinite skills and aided by my loyal subjects, have struck, with a swiftness given only to the righteous, a blow that has corrected decades of injuries and slights to my family. I rule where the Camerons once called home. I control the Cradle of Humanity. All within the Hegemony have bowed before me; those who didn’t are dead. Join me, General Kerensky. Become my sword arm and help me impress my word and wisdom upon the other realms. I’ve no reason to hate you; I wish only peace between us. Join me and convince your men and women to follow you, and I will give you power second only to mine.

But should you dare turn a blind eye to the wisdom of my offer and decide not to join, then heed my warning: I control everything the Hegemony has. All its defenses, all of its fortifications, are now manned by people loyal to me. Should you try to attack, every inch of Hegemony soil will be stained with the blood of the fallen, and every drop will be a burden upon your soul, which must already be heavy with guilt for allowing me to accomplish the complete control of your homelands.

Communiqué to General Alexandr Kerensky from "Emperor" Stefan Ukris Amaris, 16 May 2767[6]

”

However General Kerensky was neither foolish, greedy or afraid; he declared a cease-fire with all other Periphery realms and declared Stefan Amaris an usurper, starting the 13-year Amaris Civil War.

Under Kerensky's command the Star League Defense Force overran the Stefan's native Rim Worlds Republic in August 2767 and regrouped. Both Amaris and Kerensky asked the Council Lords for support. While none would officially commit to either side most of the lords tacitly supported Kerensky while giving no support whatsoever to Amaris.

Takiro Kurita died and his son Minoru became Coordinator. Minoru was bound by a last request of his father: he was to negotiate, to actively court and to covertly assist Stephan Amaris during the Amaris-Kerensky Civil War in order to safeguard his imprisoned relatives. Unable to act against Amaris, Minoru denied Kerensky passage trough the Draconis Combine.

A cornered Amaris realized that an understanding between him and Kerensky was impossible. He fulfilled his threat and entrenched his forces upon the planets of the Terran Hegemony.

“

You will fight to the last soldier, and when you die, I will call upon your damned souls to rise and speak horrible curses at the enemy.

-Amaris speaks to his troops defending Terra, January 15, 2779

”

The civil war finally climaxed with the liberation of Terra on September 3, 2779. Drago Kurita and his family were killed around this time [4].

On September 30, Kerensky captured Amaris, who ordered the surrender of all his remaining troops. The civil war was finally over.

Charged with high treason and crimes against humanity; Amaris, his family and his closest aides were found guilty after the barest sham of a trial [7], and by direct order of General Kerensky, were summarily executed by SLDF troops in November 2779.

After Amaris'd execution, Kerensky ordered his remains preserved aboard the McKenna's Pride as he debated their fate. Knowing that a formal burial site could become a place of pilgrimage for those followers committed to the Usurper's cause, Kerensky also equally recognized that to bury them in an unmarked grave or incinerate and scatter them into space would only give support to those who believed Amaris had escaped and was plotting revenge. In one of Kerensky's last acts before leaving the Inner Sphere forever, the General ultimately chose to follow the suggestion of an anonymous soldier among his command staff and donate his body to the University of New Samarkand's medical school, a very public and unglamorous end. Stefan Amaris's cryogenically preserved remains would serve as a learning tool for several generations of Combine doctors until 2863 when he was buried in the university's cemetery when it could no longer support the now LosTech cryogenic chambers.[8][9]

“

AMARIS’ LEGACY

The death of Stefan Amaris marked the beginning of the end for both the Rim Worlds Republic and most of the hard-won influence the Periphery powers had managed to garner during the Star League era. Descendants of the Rim Worlders have compared Amaris to the Terran dictator Hitler. The comparison is faulty, however, as there were many great Germans of pre-Exodus Terra, but no one else from the Rim Worlds ever gained eminence comparable to a Beethoven, a Goethe, or a Von Braun, for example.

As a citizen of the Outworlds Alliance and a descendant of the Rim Worlders, I had hoped that in the course of our research on this volume I might find some mitigating factor to modify history’s judgement of my most famous countryman. I regret to say that I have found none. As far as Amaris is concerned, the ancient slogan applies: Ig fallou blaos, dem ressensu glottuo. (“What you see is what you get,” or, literally, “if you catch this, you will have to eat it.”) Amaris may have been worse than even past historians have claimed.

Stefan Amaris was not a shrewd politician of the Maximilian Liao variety. In a letter to his wife written during the Civil War, he likened his quest to be dictator of the Human Sphere to a child’s game called “King of the Hill”. I find it significant that he chose a physical game, rather than a strategy game, for his analogy. While great gamers rarely make great leaders, any leader must understand the principles of strategy for his chosen field, be it political, military, or economic.

It is with some embarrassment that I come to the subject of my own ancestry. When Kerensky’s troops slaughtered everyone in the Rim Worlds that bore the name Amaris, they overlooked maternal cousins with names like Siever, Wong, Chan, and Marcus.

With the danger of being even distantly related to Amaris, people with those names fled the Rim Worlds. My own family settled in the Outworlds Alliance. I honestly do not know if I am a descendant of Stefan the Usurper. Genealogical records that might have cleared up my ancestry were destroyed in the aftermath of the war. It is a reflection of my parents’ macabre sense of humor that they named me Anastasia, after the Terran legend of Anastasia Romanov, daughter of the last Russian Czar.

Our research has resolved one matter, however. No conclusive link can be found between Amaris and anyone still living. With such total lack of pedigree, anyone claiming relationship to Amaris, let alone claiming leadership to any of the Rim Worlds (now the Bandit Kingdoms) on the basis of such a claim, can be assumed to be a pretender or a usurper. We can hope that the shame that my putative kinsman brought to the Periphery will never be revived, and that the carnage he brought to the Inner Sphere will never be forgotten.